A new crop of artists is blending hip-hop, funk and unfiltered passion into subtle, lovely music

In the wretched of the earth, Frantz Fanon's landmark work of revolutionary theory, the famed psychiatrist and social critic states that "the colonized man who writes for his people ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope." Fanon, who published his treatise in 1961, intended his words to apply to Third World artists struggling to shatter the psychological and metaphysical shackles of European domination. How could he have predicted that, 37 years later, his writings would succinctly summarize the raison d'etre of a new musical movement in...